thunderbird is a terrific mail application (“mail user agent” is the posh name, i believe).

pretty much the only thing i don’t like about it though is its way of formatting the date and time and not providing a way of letting me configure the date format via preferences. it got bad enough that i recently spent a bit of time to figure out how get thunderbird to display date and time in yyyy-MM-dd HH:MM format — that is, 2011-04-13 20:34 instead of 04/13/2011 08:34pm or something similarly silly.

the solution was hiding in a forum post on the ubuntu forum: by switching the locale (well, at least parts of it) to en_DK.utf8 thunderbird would use the yyyy-MM-dd HH:MM format (aka ISO date–time format).